View: BJP’s Pragya puts supporters in a plight

The intent behind putting up Pragya Thakur in the poll fray is to bring 'Hindu terror' into the electoral discourse.

This is a big relief to true champions of Hindutva, they are now free to proclaim their proclivities without being coy about the use of force to subordinate non-Hindus to the will of the majority community.

By nominating Pragya Singh Thakur as its candidate from Bhopal, the BJP has declared that it wants to fight this election in the name of Hindutva, to hell with development. The main intent of putting up Pragya Singh Thakur, against whom charges have been framed for the Malegaon bomb blast case — thanks to the court that said that the evidence did not warrant dropping charges against her as the National Investigating Agency wished to — is to bring ‘Hindu terror’ into the electoral discourse and rouse Hindu anger against her rival for the seat, Digvijaya Singh, in particular, and against the Congress, in general.

In the process, the BJP has also wantonly ripped apart the gossamer of respectability that many urbane supporters had invested it with, chanting anti-dynasty principles and free-market emancipation from cloying patronage politics, pretending not to see the party’s religious bellicosity or dismissing it as a characteristic of the fringe. The BJP has done the biggest disservice not to the Congress but to these supporters.

Pragya is vernacular for Prajna or deep consciousness. The BJP has now chosen to wear its prajna on its sleeve.

The BJP claims that use of the term Hindu terror or saffron terror damns the entire community of Hindus as terrorists, instead of accepting the simple reality that the term was used to describe terror carried out in the name of the Hindu identity, supposedly to avenge the bomb attacks on Hindus by Islamic terrorists. Of course, the BJP has no qualms about the term Islamic terror, which is used by people who use the term Hindu terror to mean terror carried out in the name of the religion by some Muslims, rather than by the entire community.

By nominating Pragya Singh Thakur, the BJP has abandoned all pretence of being a modern, rational party willing to work in a democratic framework and is bringing out from obscurity the third stanza of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s Vande Mataram, which commingles and fuses nation and militant religiosity and has, therefore, been omitted from the version sung as the national song.

Terrible with the clamorous shouts of seventy million throats,
and the sharpness of swords raised in twice seventy million hands,
who sayeth to thee, Mother, that thou are weak?
Holder of multitudinous strength,
I bow to her who saves,
to her who drives from her the armies of her foes,
The Mother!

By nominating as its candidate a saffron-clad holy woman, who is willing to blast her enemies to bits, according to the chargesheet for the 2008 Malegaon bomb blast for which she is being tried, the BJP seeks to play on the root paranoia that drives the Sangh Parivar, that Hindus are under assault in their own land.

This is a big relief to true champions of Hindutva, they are now free to proclaim their proclivities without being coy about the use of force to subordinate non-Hindus to the will of the majority community.

But it puts a major strain on those who claim their support for the BJP rests not on the majoritarian impulse but on corruption-free development. The BJP presents itself like the Batman villain, Two-Face, one half of the face the handsome visage of a former crusader against crime, the other half, a disfigured, inhuman contortion of hatred. They will have to either pretend not to see one half of the face at all, and themselves become two-faced, or embrace that hatred as well.

The BJP should not have gifted its supporters this choice between schizophrenia and paranoia.